Lower Taxes • Smaller Government • Strong Defense

by Strings Attached

Lower taxes, smaller government and a strong National defense.

Ask any Republican, and they’ll tell you that those principles are essentially the core of their party’s message. Those are the ones that are on every Republican’s list. Of course, there are factions within the party that will put other things on the list:

There are the strict constitutionalists that will talk about limiting government exclusively to constitutionally prescribed responsibilities.

There are libertarian-leaning Republicans holding back against infringement, but also opposed generally to governmental obligations (social programs). They don’t want “my tax money” going to pay for benefits for “other people”.

Then there are the Fundamentalist Christian Republicans, who operate under a delusion that the United States was “founded on Christian beliefs” ignoring the historical fact that most of those we call “founding fathers” were actually Deist. These wedge issue voters get a lot of voice within the party, but most of their actual positions are minority views even within their own party, and certainly across the nation as a whole.

But the average rank and file folks who have identified with the Republican Party for decades haven’t given it that much thought. They ascribe to a much simpler list of priorities:

Lower taxes, smaller government and a strong national defense.

It’s simple, really. Who can argue with those principles? Democrats should know there is nothing wrong with those ideas. What’s wrong is the widely held view that those ideas are somehow exclusively Republican.

When Republican’s say they are for lower taxes, they imply that Democrats are for taking more of your money and wasting it. Frankly, I don’t know any Democrats who are for wasting money.

Did you say you were for smaller government? If that means that ineffective programs should be replaced or eliminated or that redundant layers of bureaucracy should be streamlined, well, I can’t name any Democrats that would object. Individual politicians may have fallen into the ‘pork for votes’ trap, but nobody is really for it, are they?

A strong National Defense? I can’t remember the name of the Democrat who ran on a platform of weak defense, can you?

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